Well, seems like it was a fluke after all.
I played Wolfenstein 2 and started getting 'crash dump errors.' I didn't think much of it as lots of people are getting the same error. After that I started playing Assassin's Creed Origins and it CTDs randomly. Sometimes it crashes within 20 minutes and once I played 20 hours over several days without it crashing. These are not hard lock-ups or BSODs, the game just randomly closes and Uplay asks me to send a crash report. Again, I don't know whether it's just the game. Regardless, this prompted me to go back to stress testing just to check.
So I loaded up 12 instances of HCI Memtest with 98% of the total memory allocated. It went past 1000% before I stopped it. No errors.
I then loaded Prime95 and ran a blend test for 24 hours. No errors.
At this point I was pretty confident so I loaded RealBench Stress Test as this is the one that gives me the most trouble...instability detected (7z) after 40 minutes. :mad:
Once again:
Getting rid of XMP helped it pass 2 hours
Putting the CPU back to stock, XMP enabled, with a lowered IO voltage (ridiculous at stock), instability detected after about an hour.
One other thing I tried last night out of desperation was manually entering the clock, timings and voltages from a comparable (Corsair Vengeance RED LED) but lower 2666MHz kit and that seemed to work for 2 hours.
So at this stage I think I've accepted I have one of the world's worst 8700Ks. Since I have no grounds for returning that, I'm thinking of returning the RAM and getting a 2666MHz kit instead, or alternatively, just running this set at 2666MHz.
If I just wanted to run it at 2666MHz what is the best way to go about it? Do I enable XMP and just lower the clock speed and not touch the timings and voltages, or do I use similar voltages and timings from a similar kit and go from there. Or is it best to just get a dedicated 2666MHz set?
Greg W.
EASA CPL ME/IR